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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29581686">let me be your ruler</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/acorday/pseuds/acorday'>acorday</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Track to Revolution [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Snowpiercer (TV 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, F/M, Pre-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 00:01:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,514</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29581686</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/acorday/pseuds/acorday</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of Snowpiercer's departure, Melanie and the Engineers discuss how to accommodate 400 unexpected passengers without unleashing a mutiny.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Melanie Cavill &amp; Javier "Javi" de La Torre &amp; Bennett Knox, Melanie Cavill/Bennett Knox</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Track to Revolution [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2177256</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>let me be your ruler</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Look, it can work out.” Javi pushed up his glasses. “I’m almost done with the model, and it’s...on track, to kind of work, if ‘held together with duct tape and hope’ counts as working. But why are you so insistent on keeping them, anyway?”</p><p>“Because I –”</p><p>What answer should she give? There were so many. Because she’d never meant it to be that way. Because one woman shouldn’t have such power over who lived and who died. Because no matter how often she’d told herself she was prepared to do anything, give anything, she’d never thought herself a murderer.</p><p>She was vaguely aware of Ben nudging her shoulder. “Mel. Look at me. Mel.”</p><p>The figures were blurring in front of her eyes, every centimetre of the panels they used as ad-hoc whiteboards scribbled in drawings of the train, equations in her tidy little numbers, Ben’s sprawling cursive and Javi’s chicken scratch. It was going on forty hours since she’d last slept, the day she woke up in the luxurious and impersonal flat in Chicago she’d stayed in on Wilford’s dime to see the temperature at minus 30 Celsius and plummeting.</p><p><em>This is it</em>, the Engineers had called each other frantically that morning. <em>We have to go – now or never</em>. The projections had been wrong, wrong like near everything had been since the geniuses first squawked over CW-7 at a damned conference seven years ago, and they rushed out of Chicago nearly a week before the planned departure.</p><p>Leaving people behind.</p><p>“Alex,” Melanie mumbled, not realising she’d said the name out loud until she felt Ben’s arm around her shoulders, his warmth at her back.</p><p>Javi cleared his throat.</p><p>Melanie finally looked up, forced herself to focus. Just a little bit longer. They were almost done here – she’d have to sleep soon, if only for a couple hours. Because the Head of Hospitality would have to show her face then, at breakfast in First Class Dining, as she’d promised. To reassure the lot of – <em>parasites and ingrates</em>, she thought in her rougher moments, <em>fucking leeches with guns </em>– that this apocalypse wouldn’t ruin their 24-hour spa and beef bourgignons.</p><p>“...ran the numbers with Dr. Seong’s modified process, and if she’s right it might just about work,” Javi was saying. “So to summarize, Mel: we can do it. We can move the 460-ish people forward into Third and Second’s rec and storage cars, and feed them enough calories to survive. But if you want them to have the same food as Third, we’re gonna have to ration. Tightly. Including First, if you want everyone to get their 2000 a day. That’s where it’s not a matter of resource constraints anymore, where we’re doing bearable, but the politics. Can you make it happen?”</p><p>Melanie was acutely aware of Javi and Ben looking at her. Looking to her. They needed an answer. All of them on this train at the end of the world needed answers, and if she didn’t provide them, someone worse would.</p><p>“First aren’t going to like it,” said Ben. “Combined with hearing that Wilford’s not on board, it might put them over the edge. We don’t know how much firepower they brought on board. Near every passenger has got some special forces alumnus playing bodyguard, and word on the street is that Grey’s got chemical weapons. Illegal by international law, but when’s that stopped this lot?”</p><p>Melanie nodded. When she replied, it was in the steady, slow voice that years alongside Joseph Wilford had taught her, because it forced her to think before she spoke and the wrong word at the wrong time could kill. “I won’t tell them.”</p><p>“What?” said Javi.</p><p>“I won’t tell them that Wilford’s not on board.” She’d been toying with the idea almost ever since it had crossed her mind that the leadership of a narcissistic, sadistic sociopath might not best serve humanity’s last survivors, but saying it out loud still felt like a crushing burden dropping onto her shoulders. “You’re right, Ben. They won’t take the news well, and until we have a better idea what we’re dealing with, we have to maintain order.”</p><p>“That’s crazy.” Javi shook his head. “Maybe they’ll believe he’s sick or something for a day or two, but after? There’s no way they won’t figure out that we started out lying to them, and then there’s gonna be a riot. Ben – you see that, right?”</p><p>Ben was silent. Melanie recognized the slightest tilt of his head, the sideways gaze, that gave him away in deep thought. It was one of the many things she appreciated about him. In that moment she wanted to bury her head the crook of his neck and bawl her eyes out like she was back on that dirt farm in Pennsylvania and her dog had just been put down.</p><p>But she was on Snowpiercer, 1001 cars long, and it was the billions of people outside who’d just been put down. It was too cold for mercy.</p><p>“Biosecurity,” said Ben. “The story is that our Dear Leader Wilford cares so deeply for his train that he’s ensconced himself in the Eternal Engine to watch over it day and night. Any contact with the outside could jeopardize his health and risk all our deaths, since he’s the only one clever enough to drive her. It’s out there, but what about Wilford wasn’t? The man’s ninety percent myth to most of these people.”</p><p>“Oh, no.” Javi held up his hands. “Don’t tell me you’re going along with this.”</p><p>“Javi, it may be the only choice.” Melanie fought to keep her tone even, her expression a mask of calm. She would need it, if she were to have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling this off. Ben might voice full assurance in her, but she could sense how desperate they all were, regardless of their inclination to show it.</p><p>“The more perceptive of First Class will remember how he was, and surmise he’s locked himself up with booze and whores,” Ben continued. “They’re the ones who matter. Second and Third – why would their god deign them with his presence, anyway?”</p><p>“So we only have to fool two hundred people,” Javi muttered. “Great.”</p><p>They were right. First Class were the ones who mattered. Some things never changed, no matter whether she was sitting alone at the back of a lecture hall on the first day of term at MIT, or on a cruise train carrying the last of humanity.</p><p>Another thing that didn’t change: Melanie would do this. She would don the teal uniform and introduce herself as Head of Hospitality. She would lie to their faces, people who would spit on her at best if they knew what she really was. And she’d get away with it.</p><p>“You need sleep, Mel.” Ben stood, and she almost whined to feel the loss of his warmth by her side, before she remembered where she was. “This scheme isn’t going to work if you pass out from exhaustion.”</p><p>Right; he was right again. She didn’t know what she’d do without him.</p><p>Her back screamed when she stood up. Age manifested itself in so many small, painful ways that added up to an avalanche, compounded by forced insomnia and the knowledge that they were one blown fuse away from the end of the human race. Anxiety didn’t do it justice. She’d scarcely finished setting her alarm when she collapsed on her bunk and passed out, and seemingly just as quickly woke again to its beeping, more tired than before.</p><p>Melanie gave herself two minutes precisely in the hot shower, rehearsing her story in the steam. <em>Wilford is keeping us alive. I am his voice, his instrument. Wilford has decided in his immense compassion to put the refugees of the Tail to work. Rest assured, you will keep your privileges, you of the First Class whose hard-earned money built his Engine Eternal. Praise be to Wilford.</em></p><p><em>Fuck him</em>, she thought as she wrung out her hair. Even in death, he was their master. The most powerful person on the train.</p><p>Maybe Wilford, too, had been right after all, and Melanie Cavill on her own was nothing but a coward unmoored. Because when she actually stood out there and faced the wolves with their soldiers for hire and their 24-carat contempt, and they suggested that surely Mr. Wilford would promptly uncouple the unwashed masses looting the train, it felt like suicide to announce that they might be integrated forward. That they might be treated like people.</p><p>In one of her oldest memories, Melanie had been six or seven when the carnival came to town. The other children had gone for the cotton candy, the ferris wheel. She’d stood mesmerized for most of the day, watching one man spin eight plates in the air at a time, wondering how he balanced them all.</p><p>Melanie smiled as she looked into Lilah Folger’s vicious eyes and threw yet another plate up, doubling down on a lie audacious enough to be worthy of Wilford. She’d keep them spinning. She had to.</p>
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